I act nonchalant and brush off people’s demonstrations of care and concern, but the truth is, I fear hospital like your dog fears the vet.
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Posted in Surgery with tags anaesthetic, death, Kickboxing, labral tear, Surgery on January 24, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
Guard Dog in the Temple of the Goddess
Posted in sonnet with tags Goddess, guard dog, temple on December 25, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
The Goddess stirs within the temple deep
Candles flicker on the sun-burnished gong
Waked by the rasping of her naked feet
I observe the enigma of the throne
With their robes and candles, their cymbals and bells
Priests conform to scripture, and its motions
Down through the dark universe of her smell
I track along instinct and devotion
Attendant and vigilant to her needs
Obedient to her hands and what they hold
Faithful to her heart and what she loves
My beating heart and her unsandalled feet
The separate, susurrant, resonant poles
That span these sun-warmed, midnight temple stones.
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‘Art With Values’.
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory, Reading, Real Men, trauma with tags Ajax, Ancient Greece, Bryan Dorries, Drama, Navy SEAL, Sophocles, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, The Rolling Stones, Theater of War, trauma on December 22, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
There’s a friend of mine, a very successful artist, who I admire very much. I met him twenty years ago when we were working together in a dirty nightclub in South Melbourne; he was collecting glasses and I was bouncing. We both aspired to art, and he hit critical pay-dirt much earlier than I (who am I fooling – I still haven’t got there).
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‘…Just Don’t Put It on the Internet.’
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory, Reading with tags blog, Instagram, Internet, no filter, poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Graves, social media on December 15, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
Caveat:
This has been written to disturb you.
Invitation:
Summon your personal incarnation of this figure into your mind’s eye and look through it like a lens while you’re reading this.
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Ode to the XR6 Turbo
Posted in poetry, sonnet with tags Falcon, Ford, XR6 Turbo on December 4, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
The tyres shrieking their demand for traction
Where the road crests the brow of the mountain
Afternoon is a golden smelter in
The crucible of the speedometer
The ceramic squeal of heated rotors
As brakes negotiate with the motor
Stark black warnings screaming from yellow signs
Driven by rhythm of white centre line
A hare, erect and startled, stands roadside
Headlights fulminate in its amber eyes
One figure riveted as sentinel
To the flipside of the other’s vigil
Iron grey dusk rears up, pure reverie
As the turbo howls like a Valkyrie
…Because every bloke should write a poem about his car.
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Instagram: The Diabolical Mirror
Posted in Love letters with tags baby, Instagram, Max Cady, mirror, Whitney Houston on November 1, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
2.
I wonder if I’ve become a kind of Max Cady figure for her. Perhaps I am representative of old misdeeds and have turned up, winking and flashing like a bad penny.
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Instagram: The Diabolical Mirror
Posted in Love letters with tags A Sport and a Pastime, Instagram, James Salter, WASP on October 27, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
“I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am creating him out of my own inadequacies. You must always remember that.”
– James Salter,
A Sport and a Pastime.
It is worth mentioning that I found myself awake this morning, on my day off, at 4:11am. For this, I blame Y-.
For whatever reason, good or bad, I decided last night to stalk her on Instagram.
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The Sunless Side of Always
Posted in poetry, sonnet on September 29, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
I promise not to flinch to hate
I will embrace this gift of pain
I will not hide your sovereign light
Beneath this abject cloak of shame
I promise not to run and hide
Concealed in darkness of another
Nor pull your faults across my eyes
I’ll keep my word to stand and suffer
Night folds me in blackened wings
And paints a landscape sinister
Your beating heart, it echoes still
Through the tangle of my viscera
That rhythm scores these absent days
On the sunless side of always
And for those who prefer their sonnets in the traditional pentameter…
I promise that I’ll not flinch into hate
I will fully embrace this gift of pain
I will not turn and hide your sovereign light
Underneath this abject cloak of shame
I promise I’ll not run away and hide
Or curl up in darkness of another
I will not pull your faults across my eyes
I’ll keep my word that I’ll stand and suffer
As night enfolds me in its blackened wings
And paints a landscape chill and sinister
The beating of your heart, it echoes still
Through darkling tangle of my viscera
Its rhythm scores these silent, stagnant days
Encamped on the sunless side of always
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James Salter’s ‘A Sport and a Pastime.’
Posted in Reading with tags D.H.Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover on September 17, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
2.
The notion of a relationship becoming deeper and more profound as people begin to ‘transgress’ the boundaries of what a twenty-first century reader would describe as vanilla sex is also a time-worn strategy.
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James Salter’s ‘A Sport and a Pastime.’
Posted in Reading with tags A Moveable Feast, A Sport and a Pastime, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Feminism, James Salter, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Modernism, Paris on September 16, 2020 by Jarrod Boyle
1.
A Sport and a Pastime is considered – by Americans – to be an American classic. My first question, upon finishing the book, is, ‘What makes something a classic? What makes it ‘feel’ like one?’
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